Birth Of A Nation

Birth Of A Nation

They came from all over the world.

IN 63 B.C. the Roman armies invaded the land of Israel and made it part of the Roman Empire. Then Jesus came, and in response to the Jews’ rejection of him as their Messiah, he predicted just before his death in A.D. 33 that the Jewish temple would be completely destroyed (Luke 21:6). In addition, he foretold that a foreign army would conquer Jerusalem and that the Jews would be dispersed throughout the world (Luke 21:20-24). This prediction was fulfilled in A.D. 70 when, in response to an earlier Jewish revolt, the Roman armies destroyed the city of Jerusalem and its temple, killing hundreds of thousands of Jews and taking most of the survivors away captive. After a second revolt in A.D. 135, no Jews lived in Jerusalem, and they became scattered throughout the world.

Then in the late 1800s in response to anti-Semitism, particularly in eastern Europe, a Jewish movement called Zionism arose. Its goal was to create an independent Jewish state in Palestine. In 1917 in an attempt to win Jewish support for World War I, England issued the Balfour Declaration, declaring England’s support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Following World War I, the League of Nations placed Palestine under the control of England.

As the persecution of Jews by the Nazis increased during the 1930s, large numbers of refugees fled to Palestine. In response, the Palestinian Arabs revolted against the British from 1936 to 1939. In 1939 Britain decided to limit Jewish immigration, arousing militant Jewish resistance.

During World War II six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. Following the war the British continued to limit Jewish immigration to Palestine. In response, large-scale resistance organizations began operating in Palestine. In the summer of 1946, England decided to turn the problem of Palestine over to the United Nations after one such organization, under the direction of future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, blew up one wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing ninety-one.

When the matter came to a vote in the UN on November 29, 1947, the General Assembly endorsed a plan to create separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem as an international zone, due largely to U.S. president Harry Truman’s strong support.

The British Mandate was scheduled to end on May 15, 1948, at which time their troops would begin leaving. The day before, a historic meeting was held in the exhibition hall of the art museum in Tel Aviv. At exactly 4:00 P.M. the meeting was called to order by David Ben-Gurion. The audience rose and sang “Hatikvah,” the Jewish national anthem, accompanied by the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. Then David Ben-Gurion read in Hebrew Israel’s Declaration of Independence. It ended with the words “We . . . hereby proclaim the establishment of the Jewish State in Palestine, to be called Israel.” Everyone in the audience stood to their feet and applauded, many with tears streaming down their faces.

For the first time in more than two thousand years there was an independent Jewish state of Israel.

Reflection

About 585 B.C. God gave the prophet Ezekiel a vision of a valley filled with dry bones. As Ezekiel watched, first the bones came together and were covered with muscles and skin and formed dead corpses. Then God gave breath to them, and they came alive. After Ezekiel had seen the vision, God explained to him that the forming of the bones into corpses was a prophecy of how God would in the future bring the Jews back from exile into their land. This prophecy was fulfilled when Israel declared its independence from the rule of England (Ezekiel 37:1-13). The very existence of present-day Israel is a reminder to us of God’s faithfulness in keeping his promises.

O my people, I will open your graves of exile and cause you to rise again. Then I will bring you back to the land of Israel.

Ezekiel 37:12